Hum hain, ke hum nahi? / To be or not to be?
Vishal Bhardwaj and performing the Indian national identity in film adaptations of Shakespeare’s tragediesBrokenness is at the core of Othello and Hamlet. Brokenness is the parasite that makes them tragedies and the seeds of breaking are sown early on in both plays. Deterioration and fragmentation in Othello begin as soon as Brabantio pleads to Roderigo (and fathers in the audience):
Fathers, from hence trust not your daughters' minds
By what you see them act. Is there not charms
By which the property of youth and maidhood
May be abused? Have you not read, Roderigo,
Of some such thing? (I.i.186-90)
Brabantio here performs his own fragmented, broken identity; he’s no longer just a father here, but a victim too. Not only does he prefigure Othello’s downfall, he also alludes to the deaths rooted in distrust of women and misogyny which close the play as he begs us to ‘trust not your daughters’ minds’. ‘Abuse’ is echoed throughout Othello, and this is the first instance of its use; it is no coincidence that it comes from the mouth of a father, a symbolic progenitor, an authority figure who is corrupted by the supposed errancy of his daughter’s sexual autonomy and her union with an Othered man. But ‘abuse’ implies an exploitation of power – Shakespeare begs the question: where in Othello does this power to ‘abuse’ lie? Is it with Desdemona? Othello? Iago? The Turks, Venetians, Cypriots or Moors? Power structures, both domestic and geopolitical, and their inherent insidiousness, are closely scrutinised by Shakespeare in his tragedies. Hamlet, for example, is a court tragedy which questions the absurdity embedded in the mere act of performance, and its extricable relations to power and identity. Hamlet’s instructions to the first player demonstrate this quite neatly:
Speak the speech, I pray you, as I pronounced it to
you, trippingly on the tongue: but if you mouth it,
as many of your players do, I had as lief the
town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air
too much with your hand, thus, but use all gently;
for in the very torrent, tempest, and, as I may say,
the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget
a temperance that may give it smoothness. (III.ii.1883-90)
Hamlet warns the players not to merely ‘mouth it’ as they usually do, but neither to invoke the ‘very torrent, tempest’ and so on – this balancing act is an allusion to Baldassare Castiglione’s ‘golden mean’ formula from The Book of the Courtierwhich was a treatise for Renaissance courtiers on how to be perfect (or rather, how to perform their public personae perfectly).
It’s hard to ignore the strong possibility that this is also Shakespeare making a mockery not only of himself, as he often did, but also of the illusory façade that performance provided to the roles power and identity in Elizabeth I’s famously Machiavellian court. To jump only five years after her death, the East India Trading Company was founded in 1608. Fast forward further, and in 1858, the pre-meditated assembly of hierarchy and power structures built on identity came into full force during the British occupation of India.
Under the Raj, the teaching of Shakespeare was itself a method of intellectual colonisation; Shakespeare’s works were used to culturally assimilate Indians into the Western canon. But in his Hindi crime-film adaptations (Maqbool [2003], Haider [2014] and Omkara [2006]), director Vishal Bhardwaj has instead assimilated Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello into Indian contexts and used Shakespeare’s original themes to question power structures and even the concept of national identity within India itself. I’ll only discuss Haider and Omkara’s specific relationships with Indian identities and how they intersect with the text here, but this is not to say that Maqbool is not an excellent excuse to brush up on your Shakespearean tragedies.
Bhardwaj sets Haider (just ‘Hamlet’ neatly transliterated into Kashmiri) in the contested territory of Kashmir, which has historically been a source of geopolitical tension for both India and Pakistan ever since Partition. After brutalities committed by both Indian and Pakistani military forces in Kashmir, a percentage of Kashmiris themselves now belong to separatist movements. Of course, this does not stop right-wing Indian propagandists from claiming that Kashmir’s real vulnerability to violence lies at its Pakistani border; naturally the Other is the true aggressor.
With this context in mind, Bhardwaj uses the absurdity of the performed persona in Hamlet to expose the farce of Indian national identity in Haider. This is immediately obvious to me when I note where and why Bhardwaj deviates from the source text. As opposed to taking place in a graveyard, Hamlet’s famous ‘to be or not to be’ (III.i.1749) speech takes place in the town square underneath what appears to be a minaret, positioning him in the role of a messenger or prophet.
A crowd gathers around Haider to listen to him speak
Haider/Hamlet (Shahid Kapoor) has shaved his head, donned ragged attire and has managed to wrap a noose around his neck, theatrically expressing his own descent into suicidal ideation. A crowd has gathered around him. The scene opens with canned sounds of monolithic applause and laughter from the crowd which have obviously been interposed onto the footage in post. The audience is forcibly laughing at Haider, performing a dark caricature of his own sorrowful self, and Bhardwaj is laughing at the audience inside his film as well as the one watching it. Just as they mindlessly consume Haider’s post-ironic suicidality without being able to differentiate false pain from the real thing, so do we when we watch Haider without questioning its politics.
This is likely a criticism of the Indian film industry – Bhardwaj has faced much contempt from the Board of Censorship in India for his controversial politics, even garnering the derision of the internet with the hashtag ‘#BoycottHaider’ on Twitter. But Bhardwaj defended the film with this statement:
I'm also an Indian, I'm also a patriot, I also love my nation. So I won't do anything which is anti-national. But what is anti-human, I will definitely comment on it. (Bhardwaj, BBC). Bhardwaj’s ‘patriotism’, however, and his identification as an ‘Indian’ seems less obvious and prescriptive when we watch what follows in the scene. As Haider begins his speech, he embeds it within recitations of legal phrases from the era of the British Raj, which already complicates the provenance of his own personal and political voice:
Haider: [in a stereotypical ‘Englishman’ caricature] UN COUNCIL, Resolution No. 47 of 1948. Article II of the Geneva Convention, and Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. [He begins speaking in Hindi chaotically]. There is but one question! Do we exist or do we not? If we do... then who are we? If we don’t... then where are we? If we exist, then why do stand here? If we don’t exist, where did we lose ourselves? Did we exist at all? or not? Our suffering comes from their chutzpah. (Haider).
This stereotypical ‘English’ voice and mannerism makes an irreverent mockery of the Raj and the cultural assimilation that was attempted by teaching Shakespeare to Indians in the first place. Both English and Hindi jar discordantly together as modes of communication into Haider’s speech, a speech which was once only about Hamlet’s personal individual awakening to his own mortality and submission to nihilism. By placing him in this patchwork, historically complicated geopolitical context, Hamlet becomes Haider – and Haider represents the question of Indian nationhood pushed to it’s very limits. His movements are jerky, his speech is fast, his eyes are almost translucent. And Haider is Kashmir: Bhardwaj positions him politically as the axis at which India, Pakistan and the pandemic beast of human cruelty all collide. In one of his essays on Shakespeare, Hazlitt wrote that:
‘it is we who are Hamlet. […] Whoever has become thoughtful and melancholy through his own mishaps or those of others; […] the insolence of office, or the spurns which patient merit of unworthy takes’. (56).In Haider, Bhardwaj appropriates and re-contextualizes Hazlitt’s ‘we’ into that of the Indian ‘we’ – the crisis-of-national-identity ‘we’. But the ‘others’ Hazlitt mentions here is also referent to the same person/people as the ‘we’. The introspective maze of ‘question’ing that Hamlet gets lost in during the ‘to be or not to be’ speech is the same kind of criticism that Bhardwaj encourages of the nation.
Haider simultaneously births the concept of Indian nationhood as defined by the West when he spits the ‘Geneva Convention’ phrases, but he also threatens destruction and chaos by contextualizing it into the narrative of his own revenge plot, his own nihilism and suicidal ideation.
To complicate matters further, here we see the court tragedy play out once more: the idea being that Indians are merely performing their identity on the international stage, as defined by the ‘Geneva Convention’, for example. By threatening his own oblivion (‘to die – to sleep’ [III.i.1757]), as well as alluding to the allegorical birth of the nation by quoting these post-colonialist legal articles, Haider threatens the oblivion of the concept of Indian nationhood and national identity if it continues to carry out its torture in Kashmir.
This is all underpinned by the currents of absurdity, illusion and farce. The crowd around him (and us, watching) merely clap and laugh at his ‘performance’, and just as Hamlet instructs the players to follow the ‘golden mean’, so does Bhardwaj make a farce of Indian cinema and Bollywood, which so often serves to suppress radical, politically critical voices in India and instead support the powers that be.
But who are the powers that be in India? Who are the ruling classes? In Omkara, Bhardwaj appropriates Shakespeare’s questions of race and racial identity raised in Othello at the dawn of the Imperial Age. Omkara navigates the same confusion of Otherness and fragmented identity as Othello, illustrated in the wrought final lines before Othello commits suicide:
in Aleppo once,
Where a malignant and a turban'd Turk
Beat a Venetian and traduced the state,
I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
And smote him, thus. (V.ii.3723)
Though throughout the play, Othello aligns himself with the Venetians. He serves Venice as a military hero, he marries the Venetian Desdemona and leads a Venetian fleet into battle. Despite all of this, by the end of the play he alludes to himself as ‘a malignant and a turban’d Turk’. In contemporary geopolitical terms, he refers to himself as the most threatening enemy to Venice – the brute, the Other, the Muslim. However, to place Othello into an all-Indian context would potentially mean erasing the question of race and the difficulty in what it means to be ‘Turk’, ‘Venetian’, ‘Indian’ or Other. Instead of overtly questioning a society at the dawn of the concept of ‘race’, however, Bhardwaj instead uses the caste-system to contextualize oppression and power-struggles in a modern Indian context.
Though Omkara/Othello (Ajay Devgan) does still have considerably darker skin than the rest of the cast, in particular Dolly/Desdemona (Kareena Kapoor), in the film he is the son of ‘a kanjar and a Brahmin’.
“But the mistake [of letting you interact with Dolly] is mine as well,” the beleaguered Raghunath Misra admits, “I forgot that you are a Brahmin, but only partially. Half of the blood that runs in your body belongs to that kanjarwoman as well” (“पर गलती तो हमारी ही है, भूल गया की तू ब्राह्मण तो है पर आधा. आधा खून तो तेरे बदन में उस कंजरी का भी है). (Sharda, 617).A Brahmin is the highest caste in the Hindu caste-system, and by contrast the kanjar is one of the lowest. By being neither one nor the other, Omkara really becomes ‘out-caste’, and is repeatedly referred to throughout the film as the ‘half-Brahmin’, just as Othello is referred to as a ‘Moor’ a big, Othering, 59 times in Othello. It’s his half-Brahmin identity which allows Omkara to have any social mobility in Indian society – even in a modern context, a dalit or complete out-caste version of Omkara would in no way be able to realistically socially manoeuvre himself into the position of marrying Dolly:
The question that we are consequently faced with is whether it is impossible for the director Vishal Bhardwaj even fictionally to construct a credible situation in which a Brahmin woman marries an outcaste in contemporary India. For the tale of Othello, it could be argued, is not analogous to “near-black half-Brahmin” Omkara marrying a “near-white Brahmin” woman like Dolly. Far from it: the tale of Othello is the untold story of Omkara’s father (a pure Brahmin) marrying a kanjar woman. (Sharda, 617).In place of the beautiful language or ‘witchcraft’ (I.iii.515) which gives our titular tragic hero his social leverage in Othello, Omkara’s acceptability into higher-caste society is achieved by re-affirming his Hinduism. Bhardwaj shows us visual representations of caste as he invokes Hindu symbols and rituals – for example, Omi wears the janoi, a thread worn across the chest, reserved solely for Brahmin men, even though he is of mixed caste. But let’s not overlook Bhardwaj’s choice of name in the film either – Dolly is likely a Westernized nickname for a real name we never learn, and it’s no coincidence she is fair-skinned and is, along with Kesu/Cassio, educated to college level. This is the privilege they share instead of their Venetian-ness:
Ishu: Is it not probable, that Kesu would have looked at Dolly with a lustful eye during their college days? (Omkara).
Once more, back to the names: Ishu ‘Langda’ Thyaagi, Omkara’s Iago, translates to ‘flawed one’. But the most significant choice of name is the eponymous protagonist’s – Omkara is one of the many names of Lord Shiva, who plays the role of ‘the Destroyer’ in the Hindu trimurti. As a deity he is both feared and deeply respected, and by naming him after a God, Bhardwaj realises Omkara as an almost divine agent of destruction in the play. His Othered status is received cruelly within the society of the film, but his real purpose seems to be to destroy this same society.
In Bhardwaj’s adaptation, it’s the most challenged, least-privileged members of Indian society who are likened to gods and goddesses. Indu delivers a speech pertaining to the justice of women, forewarning Omi and the audience that women ought not to be treated like property, punching with a feminism which Bhardwaj acknowledges is deeply necessary in modern India:
Indu: We sacrifice our home, family, caste everything and come to your world empty handed. Even if Dolly passes through fire to determine her purity, even then you will not be able to accept her. (Omkara).
Here Indu compares Dolly to Princess Sita in the allusion to her ‘passing through fire to determine her purity’. As the consort of Lord Rama in the Ramayana, Sita was abducted, and Rama fought the ten-headed demon Ravana in Lanka (Sri Lanka) to bring her back, only to then question her faithfulness and ‘purity’ after her return. She passed through holy fire, and in shock from her faith to Rama even being questioned, allowed herself to be swallowed by the Earth, according to the legend. Dolly is not the only female character who is given the goddess-status, however. At the end of the film, before killing her husband Langda (as opposed to Iago killing Emilia, notably), we see a shot of Indu’s face as the door opens on her:
Indu opens the door on her husband, Ishu ‘Langda’ Thyagi before she slashes his throat.
She appears here almost as a vision of Durga, the Hindu goddess who is revered and celebrated for slaying demons in the mythology and is often seen as a redeemer and protector of women and children especially. Instead of Emilia dying at the hands of her husband, she herself unleashes divine revenge on him. Compared to Ghazal’s final suicide by mass detonation in Haider, this is perhaps a more redemptive take on what is otherwise a play which is deeply concerned with how warring concepts of the same national identity ultimately devour each other.
A statue of Maa Durga, often seen as a liberator and enactor of divine justice
In both Hamlet and Othello, most of the characters end up either dead or deeply broken. They succumb to the oblivion of nothingness, or the cracks in their society widen so far that they fall through. Bhardwaj’s adaptations are fables to modern Indian audiences: turn a blind eye to inequalities, to injustices, to the broken parts of society, and the nation, and your sense of yourself, will implode.
His questions surrounding the Indian national identity are perhaps now more crucial than ever since Indira Gandhi or Partition. India’s Prime Minister Narendra’ Modi belongs to the BJP, a far-right Hindu-Nationalist party, and his socio-political stance and conception of what ‘Indian identity’ means seems to narrow by the week. Bhardwaj violently explodes topics which are swept under the rug in commercial Indian cinema/Bollywood. Kashmir and caste are just two of the seeds in Indian society which threaten to break the façade of the national identity.
There is, perhaps, a sense of insecurity – a need to over-compensate with jingoism and Hindu nationalism in Bollywood cinema, which makes effective propaganda in a nation of more than a billion people. It is a cultural weapon in India’s arsenal against its own people, dominated by upper-caste, light-skinned North Indian Hindus, and a small number of wealthy, light-skinned Muslims. Perhaps an attempt to regain control of national identity and culturally dominate the West as a method of avoiding self-reflection and criticism of one’s own nation.
Case in point about insecurity?: an ‘emotional scene’ from Kabhi Kushi Kabhie Gham (2001), a mainstream Bollywood family film, wherein Krish, the son of an Indian immigrant to the U.K., leads a choir of his European classmates to sing the Indian national anthem.
But overall, Bhardwaj takes after Shakespeare in that he questions the existence of a single national identity in general – all three of his adaptations of the tragedies, Maqbool, Haider and Omkara are set in vastly different areas of India with different aesthetics and even dialects to match. Compare Haider’s performance of the song (also written and scored by Bhardwaj) ‘Bismil’ to Omkara’s performance of ‘Beedi’ or ‘Namak’. Both utilize the different aesthetics of the region in which they are set; ‘Bismil’ uses the motif of the ‘bird’, and the staccato, aggressive, masculine dance to highlight Haider’s internal frustration and attempted machismo. In Omkara, ‘Namak’ and ‘Beedi’, however, use the outlaw aesthetic of political crime gangs and corrupt police forces to signify transgression and the breakdown of the ‘Law and Order’ that Haider mocks like a parrot in Haider.
The only common theme in both films seems to be the inevitable promise of destruction of the nation, and a karmic justice of the oppressed over their oppressors ending in total oblivion, and the death of ‘Indian-ness’. Just as Othello is the ‘Turk’, the ‘Moor’ and the ‘Venetian’, Bhardwaj wonders just how post-colonialist, Imperial, anti-separatist, Kashmiri, Uttar Pradeshi, Malayali, Hindu, Muslim, Maoist, Nationalist, Brahmin, kanjar, could all possibly be considered ‘Indian’ at once.
WORKS CITED
Shakespeare, William, and Roma Gill. Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Print.
Shakespeare, William, Linda Cookson, and Bryan Loughrey. Othello. London: Longman, 1991. Print.
Bhardwaj, Vishal. Haider. India: UTV Motion Pictures, 2014. DVD.
Bhardwaj, Vishal. Omkara. India: Eros Entertainment, 2006. DVD.
Sharda, S. "Black Skin, Black Castes: Overcoming a Fidelity Discourse in Bhardwaj’s Omkara." Shakespeare Bulletin, vol. 35 no. 4, 2017, pp. 599-626. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/shb.2017.0046
Hazlitt, William. “Hamlet”. Characters Of Shakespear's Plays. London: Macmillan, 1925. Print.